Search Results

This chapter discusses skylines, which are lines that are formed by the peaks of all the individual desert lines. It considers the assumption that the skyline is continuous, and then addresses the question of whether the skyline is bounded along the X axis or not. It studies the upper and lower bound of the skyline before it discusses several examples of constant skylines (standard, negative, and sea level skylines). The next section examines V shaped skylines and mentions several varieties of desert. This chapter ends with a section on taking stock, where it also shows how incomplete and misleading a theory of desert would be if one is restricted to discussing desert in terms of multipliers only.

This chapter focuses on peaks, a concept which was introduced in a previous chapter. The first section deals with the absolute desert mapping function, which records certain levels of vice or virtue and maps them on specific assignments of absolute desert. This is followed by a discussion of curved mapping functions and a review of the Sym Mountain. The chapter then attempts to distinguish the line between positive and negative peaks and the line between vice and virtue. It also reviews the V shaped skyline and introduces the logical limits of bell motion. The chapter ends with a study of the disaggregationist approach.

This chapter examines different forms of variation. It first studies the concept of comparative bell motion, which features comparative desert lines that have various orientations. It then discusses comparative skylines that result from disregarding all points of the comparative desert lines except for the peaks, and considering the line that is composed of only the peaks. The next section looks at variation in the amount of good carried out when comparative desert is satisfied, which may depend on the moral significance of the people involved and not on the size of the gap in what is absolutely deserved. It also identifies two ways where certain comparative desert lines might differ. This chapter ends with a discussion of what might happen if only one feature of desert lines is accepted, and introduces the act of sliding up.

This chapter details the reconstruction of Chicago following the Great Fire. Chicago grew faster than any American city through the depression-scarred 1870s. By 1880 its population reached half a million, nearly doubling in size since the Fire. In 1879 just under 1100 new buildings were constructed in the city, but in 1883 there were over 4000. The city's building code, developed in the conservative years of the depression, came under increasing pressure as the motive to build higher returned with new investment. The emergence of the tall skyscraper was gradual, and the convergence of Chicago skyscrapers toward remarkably similar composition, proportions, and even detail occurred in several loosely defined steps between the end of the “hard times” around 1879 and the flourishing of what was called the “Chicago Style” or “Chicago Construction” of the late 1880s.

This chapter focuses on the conflicts around Skyline High School between black middle-class parents and white homeowners who fought over whether children at the school were dangerous criminals or innocent kids. It begins with a portrait of Loraine and James Smith, a couple who led very active political lives fighting to improve Oakland's public schools. It then considers how the history of Skyline High School made the politics of youth in the neighborhood particularly racially charged before turning to the debate over whether or not youth at the school were dangerous or criminal. In particular, it examines white neighbors' calls for color-blindness and the argument of black parents in defense of their children against the image of black youth criminality. Finally, it explores the polarized racial politics around Skyline High School that led black parent activists to engage in spatial politics in the hills.

This chapter introduces the book, the major themes, the method of analysis, and the related literature. It discusses how we can view the rise and growth of the Manhattan skyline as a system of interrelated parts based on the “battle for place” among the countless people who have lived, worked, and played in the city. The books takes a tripartite approach using (1) basic economic theory, (3) data and statistics, and (3) the historical record, to understand what drove the emergence and the location of skyscrapers and the skyline. Although many works have discussed several aspects related the economics of the skyline, this book is the first to systematically investigate its economic history; an economic approach allows for the debunking of several myths related to Manhattan’s real estate history.

This part of the book examines the emergence of the modern skyline and the ways in which it acquired symbolic and cultural significance between 1890 and 1940. The discussion takes the post-9/11 city as a point of departure to bring into focus the cultural and architectural significance of the New York skyline as a site and source of anxiety. It then circles back to the early high-rise architecture of pioneers like Cass Gilbert and Ernest Flagg to focus on the rise of the modern skyscraper, cityscapes, panoramas, verticality, and imaginations of the vertical city. The main argument in Part I is that the modern skyline of New York figures across a diverse body of cultural production as a highly unstable space to read and interpret. In works ranging from the immigrant stories of Abraham Cahan and Willa Cather to the social realist paintings of the Ashcan School, the high-rise photography of Alfred Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the vertiginous flickerings of urban actuality films and avant-garde cinema, the skyline hovers between the sublime and the uncanny, ultimately figuring as a site of instability and change that invites yet resists interpretation.